


Greatest Day

by Minnow_53



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Fluff and Humor, Fluffy Ending, M/M, Marauders Era (Harry Potter), Romantic Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-31
Updated: 2020-07-31
Packaged: 2021-03-06 03:27:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,392
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25626667
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Minnow_53/pseuds/Minnow_53
Summary: Sirius discovers he's in love.
Relationships: Sirius Black/Remus Lupin
Kudos: 38





	Greatest Day

**Author's Note:**

> First published on LiveJournal 26/3/06. Thanks to Asterie for the beta.

Sirius woke up feeling happy, so ridiculously happy that he was certain one of his friends must have put a jinx on him.

He bounded over to the bed next to his, and pulled the sheets off James. ‘Hey, Prongs, you rotten, cheating bastard.’

James remained asleep, though he did lash out at Sirius blindly, muttering something that sounded like, ‘No prawns today, thanks.’

Sirius contemplated him. Surely it wasn’t possible for someone who slept so soundly to have got up in the night, crept to the neighbouring bed and cast a double-strength Cheering Charm? Unless he’d been sleepwalking, of course. Not that there was anything intrinsically wrong with a Cheering Charm. It was just...unnatural to feel this good. 

If James wasn’t directly responsible, he’d probably asked Peter to do it for him. Peter was always willing, avid, even, to do James’s bidding. Filthy little rat. Sirius vowed he’d get him for this.

But the sight and sound of Peter sprawled on his back, half-in, half-out of bed and snoring loudly, was off-putting enough to send Sirius scuttling back to the relative safety of his own four-poster, where he pondered this wonderful new feeling.

It was Friday, which was always good, but Friday came every week without fail and didn’t usually evoke such a powerful reaction. Maybe it was someone’s birthday? The day had that wonderful air of anticipation, with the sun shining so cheerfully through the curtains. 

But no. Remus, James and Peter had all turned seventeen earlier in the year. As for Sirius, he was going to be eighteen in November, and he couldn’t remember the sun ever shining on his birthday, at least not like this.

He got up again and opened the curtains and then the window, not caring if he woke the others. The day smelled as good as it looked, of newly-mown grass and the fat orange roses that grew in profusion in the Hogwarts grounds, and the scent of baking bread wafting up from the kitchens. And it felt sublime: warm and dry, with a tiny, breathless breeze ruffling the leaves of the willows down by the lake.

‘What are you doing, Sirius?’ A sleepy voice, but not a plaintive one, and certainly not babbling about prawns, though it could have been ‘pawns’. Perhaps James was playing chess in his sleep.

‘Ah, just the person I wanted to talk to!’ Sirius all but leapt across the dorm and plonked himself at the edge of Remus’s bed, eager to tell him about the mysterious hex.

Sirius didn’t for a second wonder if Remus might have been the one to jinx him. He knew that Remus would never do anything to harm him, firstly because he wasn’t like that and secondly because Remus had had a crush on Sirius since they’d started at Hogwarts. He was perfectly open about it, so the others didn’t even tease him; or not much. After all, James was hardly one to talk when it came to crushes, not to mention a spot of stalking. Peter was in thrall to James, and Sirius liked Remus far too much and was also a bit flattered.

‘I’ve been jinxed,’ Sirius explained. ‘Or I think I have. I feel like someone’s put some sort of Cheering Charm on me.’

Remus looked blank. ‘Is that bad? Anyway, I’d never jinx you,’ he said. ‘I know you’d like me to, because it would mean I wasn’t, well, looking up to you any more.’

‘It’s okay,’ Sirius said gently. ‘In a few months’ time, you’ll be hexing me non-stop. I’m sure the next girl will do the trick.’ 

They were all trying, in their various ways, to help him get over his crush. It was understandable perhaps in an eleven year-old finding friends for the first time, but he was really too old now to hero-worship another boy.

‘Especially me,’ Sirius pointed out. ‘I mean, even my own family don’t want me! Why would you?’

Sirius had spent the past year assiduously introducing him to the best friends of the many girls he went out with. Remus had the pick of the cream of Hogwarts. He’d even been allowed to plait Rosalind Rowan’s waist-length black hair, and she raved to her friends about his expressive hands and delicate touch. ‘He never needs a wand to get out my knots!’ Sirius privately thought it a bit demeaning for Remus to comb a girl’s hair. He wasn’t displeased that the affair ended almost before it began, when Remus decided he’d rather spend the weekend playing Exploding Snap with James and arguing the finer points of Muggle Studies with Sirius. Still, it seemed a bit of a waste.

Sirius reminded himself that Remus might be annoying when he couldn’t see a good thing right in front of him, but he was also endlessly kind and patient, willing to help and extremely creative with pranks. It was Remus who’d transformed the Slytherin boys’ robes into pink dresses trimmed with feathers, and timed the spell to kick in during a Hogsmeade weekend. So who better than Remus to confide in now, especially when he asked, with concern, ‘So why d’you think someone’s put a spell on you anyway?’

‘I’m feeling strange,’ Sirius replied, pulling back the covers and snuggling in beside his friend; it was warm, but the floors were cold. 

Remus leaned against his pillows and contemplated Sirius with genuine interest. ‘How strange?’

‘Well, happy. Very happy. And my stomach’s gone sort of fizzy. But nice fizzy. I feel like I swallowed a firework. And don’t tell me it’s because I ate too much trifle last night.’

Remus narrowed his eyes as he thought, and his brow furrowed in concentration. He really did have very nice eyes, with so many different colours in them: blue and green and brown, but no grey. Sirius was glad of that. Grey was a cold colour, he thought, and always reminded him of his mother scolding him, her voice growing shriller and shriller.

‘Well,’ Remus said finally, fiddling with the edge of his sheet, ‘I s’pose you could be in love.’

He sounded so gloomy that Sirius felt a tiny bit less happy for a moment, but then he rallied. ‘Oh. Why d’you say that, Moony?’

‘I know what it’s like, don’t I? But there’s no point talking about it. Anyway, that’s what’s wrong with you. Definitely.’

Sirius immediately felt euphoric again. In love? Well, it was about time.

‘Wow,’ he said, impressed with both Remus and himself. ‘So what do I do now?’

Remus looked faintly incredulous. ‘You tell her, of course.’ He pushed his fringe out of his eyes with a gesture that was slightly clumsy for Remus, and Sirius noted how the sun caught the fair strands and turned them golden. All in all, it was a very golden morning, he decided, and worthy to be enshrined in his memory forever.

There was only one problem. ‘Tell who?’

Remus laughed. ‘The lucky girl, of course. Prat!’ He shoved at Sirius affectionately, and Sirius shoved back, and for a few minutes they wrestled on the bed, until Remus succeeded in pinning Sirius’s hand behind his back and Sirius begged for mercy.

Then, he had the task of discovering exactly who the girl was. ‘You see,’ he admitted to Remus, once the bed had been smoothed down again and the blanket rescued from the mess of crumbs and paperbacks under the bed, ‘I went out with five girls last week.’

‘Slut,’ said Remus, but his tone was light. ‘It must have been whoever you were with last night.’

‘Well, that’s a bit odd, really,’ Sirius mused. ‘I went out with that girl who hangs round with Smith and Evans. You know. The blonde spiky one, with purple highlights.’

‘Padfoot,’ Remus said sternly, ‘are you trying to tell me you’ve fallen head over heels for this girl and you can’t even remember her name?’

Sirius hung his head. ‘Obviously, she affected me in other ways. So what’s she called, then?’

‘Tabitha,’ Remus said. ‘I don’t know how you could forget that. Just think cat.’

‘Yeah. Well, maybe I’m so madly in love with her that her name isn’t even important. ‘

‘I really hope you didn’t sleep with her, in that case,’ Remus said, and Sirius threw the pillow at him, and after a short but satisfying fight, which Sirius won this time, the other two were awake and grumbling.

James sat up in bed, his hair wilder than ever, and groaned. Peter, taking his cue from the master, butted in with a rather prissy, ‘If you have to make such a racket at the crack of dawn, go down to the common room.’ 

Sirius spent an absorbing few minutes trying to brain Peter with his own alarm clock, and then it was time to get ready for breakfast. 

Remus and Sirius were the first Gryffindors downstairs, and Tabitha arrived soon afterwards with her friends. She always sat between Lily Evans and Zoe Smith at meals, diagonally opposite Remus. Remus kicked Sirius when he made for his usual seat. ‘Take mine. Then you’ll get a better view of her.’

As Sirius sat down in Remus’s place, he found to his pleasure that his happiness hadn’t evaporated in the rush of getting washed, dressed and ready for the school day. If anything, he was feeling even stranger, light-headed and a tiny bit dizzy. Sunshine poured down from the enchanted ceiling, and the light caught Remus in profile, gilding his straight nose and the curve of his cheekbone. Sirius gazed at him for a moment, enraptured. Then, he remembered his mission and turned his attention to his breakfast and Tabitha, in reverse order.

He tried to recreate the previous evening. They’d met in the library and sneaked out to Hogsmeade for a couple of Butterbeers; nothing dramatic. Tabitha had a Potions test today, so they’d got back to Gryffindor Tower quite early and she’d gone to bed. Sirius had a vague memory of kissing her goodnight, just at the edge of her mouth, but for some reason he’d been preoccupied with wondering whether Remus was still awake so he could ask him about the Divination homework. He’d been glad to see Remus sitting on his bed scribbling on a sheet of parchment, and they’d spent a while discussing horoscopy and analysing each others’ handwriting. 

Remus, it seemed, was anal, repressed and had a wild, uncontrollable streak that he tried to hide. Sirius was impulsive, intelligent and analytical.

‘I don’t see where the analytical comes from,’ Remus said, frowning, and Sirius countered, ‘I’d be more worried about being anal and repressed, mate.’

‘I’m hardly repressed, Padfoot. I’m the person who’s told everyone that I’m hung up on you. That’s not repressed. That’s blabbing my head off.’

‘Moony,’ Sirius said patiently, ‘the short tails on the ys do not lie.’ 

In fact, it had been such a productive session that Tabitha had rather disappeared, swallowed up in the discovery that Remus often forgot to cross his ts.

But all that time he’d obviously been thinking about her unconsciously, probably about her lovely eyes – Sirius glanced across to check their colour, and was a bit surprised they were brown. He’d have guessed blue. He did like her spiky hair; that was why he’d asked her out in the first place. Maybe, when they were engaged, she’d do his hair for him and put in some highlights. 

He also discovered, to his delight and astonishment, that being in love affected his sense of taste. The porridge was ambrosial this morning, the cream unctuous, and the brown sugar formed beautiful, melting islands in the middle of his bowl. He looked up to see whether Remus was finding the meal transcendental too, and decided that he rather envied Remus if he felt like this all the time.

‘You’re so lucky,’ he said, through a mouthful of the most buttery, tasty eggs the house-elves had ever produced.

‘Why?’

‘Being in love with me for six years. It must be amazing.’

‘I have a schoolboy crush on you, that’s all. Or that’s what my mum calls it, anyway. And it’s not always nice. It can be horrible. Sometimes, I just want to crawl into a cupboard and stay there for good. Like when you keep flaunting all those girls in front of me.’

Sirius felt as if the sun had been momentarily blotted out. He chewed his eggs slowly, but they seemed to have lost their taste. ‘Oh. I didn’t realise it was that bad. I’m sorry, Moony.’

Remus seemed equally upset. ‘So am I. And it’s none of my business what you do, anyway. Don’t take it to heart, Padfoot. I feel wonderful right now. Have some toast. The marmalade’s brilliant today.’

It was. Sirius was unable to stop his mouth curving upwards as he bit into the crunchy triangle. He looked across the table, trying to catch Tabitha’s eye. She gave him a brief smile and turned away. 

‘Moony,’ Sirius hissed, panicked, ‘she seems a bit uptight with me.’

James, who was always late down to breakfast and had no time for idle chatter in between mouthfuls, finally pushed his plate aside. ‘What’s wrong with you two this morning?’

‘I’m in love with Tabitha,’ Sirius explained, at the same moment as Remus said, ‘He’s in love with Tabitha.’

They hooked fingers to make a wish.

‘Oh,’ James said, almost bouncing on his chair with excitement. ‘But she’s one of Lily’s friends! I don’t know why Moony won’t go out with Zoe, but perhaps you could get Tabitha to listen, Padfoot. Or give Evans a letter. I have one all ready, you know. First, I tell her some serious stuff about myself, to impress her a bit. You know, how clever I am, and dedicated to fighting the Dark Arts. And I’ve enclosed a photo of me in my Quidditch robes...’

James’s wittering on could always clear a table in seconds, even if his words weren’t exactly audible at the other end: he tended to get very loud and overexcited, especially when he was talking about Lily. He was still halfway through telling Sirius about his wonderful espistle when Tabitha, Zoe and Lily all stood up, ready to leave. 

‘Hey, Prongs,’ Sirius interrupted, ‘they’re going.’

James, without skipping a beat, said, ‘Well, you’d better catch Tabitha now if you want to fit in a quick snog before lessons,’ and shouted, ‘Oi, Evans!’

Lily ignored him, as always, but the other two turned round and James said, ‘Black wants a word, I think.’

‘Yeah, yeah, I do,’ Sirius said, standing up so quickly that he knocked his chair down, ‘Tabitha, could you hold on a minute?’

Zoe Smith mumbled something incoherent and rushed to catch Lily up. Sirius noticed that she cast a wistful look at Remus. He could almost begin to feel sorry for the girl, he decided, with her unrequited affection. But he didn’t have much time to think about Zoe, because he had Tabitha to deal with.

She hovered on the other side of the table, obviously eager to get back to her dorm. ‘Come on, Black, spit it out. I have a Potions test, as I’ve already told you. Not that you probably heard. You were too busy ogling that barmaid.’

Sirius thought for a terrible moment that he might actually have fallen in love with the barmaid rather than Tabitha, but decided that would be too farfetched. He lowered his voice; not that he needed to, because the Great Hall was empty now, except for him and Tabitha, of course, and James, Peter and Remus, who were obviously eager to back their friend up in his declaration. He wondered wildly whether he’d have to get Tabitha a ring. Would she let him call her Tabby? And damn, was she a pureblood? Not that it mattered, because he’d left home anyway. He was of age, and didn’t need his parents’ consent to marry.

‘Tabitha, I love you,’ he blurted out.

Peter sniggered, with nerves, Sirius hoped, and Remus laid an encouraging hand on his shoulder. Sirius went hot all over, as if he had a fever. No doubt that was because he was just a table’s width away from the object of his adoration.

He was expecting her to rush over, fling herself into his arms, and confess reciprocal love for him, like in a romantic novel. Not that he read those novels himself, of course. However, she stayed where she was; in fact, she took a step backwards. She also glowered at him, and asked rather coldly, ‘Is this one of your pranks?’

‘No,’ Sirius said. ‘It’s not. I woke up today with the strangest feeling...’

‘Hangover,’ Tabitha snapped. ‘You’re an animal with those Butterbeers, you know that?’ She wheeled round and strolled off, her head held high.

Sirius’s first reaction was indignation. Stupid girl! He’d thought that women were meant to fall in love with everyone who fell in love with them. Obviously, he’d been mistaken. And she wasn’t kind and understanding either, or even clever. Why, she didn’t have a fraction the intelligence Remus had. Remus had known at once what was wrong with him.

Standing there spurned, Sirius waited for his euphoria to evaporate and, at worst, be replaced by the despair Remus had told him about. Perhaps he should head straight up to the dorm and hide under his bed.

But nothing happened; nothing bad, anyway. Remus’s hand still lay on his shoulder, comforting this time, the circle of his palm now creating a bright spot that seemed to burn through Sirius’s robes and on to his skin. And the happy feeling was actually growing stronger, as if he were looking for a hidden object and getting warmer and warmer.

He grinned at his friends. ‘Well, women, right?’ 

James rolled his eyes, and Peter sniggered again. ‘I wouldn’t know,’ Remus said, which was a bit unfair, Sirius decided, when you considered Rosalind of the long hair, not to mention Jane, Angela and Patty, who had all done their best for Remus.

But then, he thought about Remus hunched up in a chair in the common room, reading his Runes textbook when Sirius came in late from a date, and his heart contracted a bit. Perhaps he was wrong to try and cure him. Perhaps he should have been more understanding. Instead of spending hours interviewing potential girlfriends for Remus, he could have been getting to know him better. Not that he didn’t know him well already, both as his friend and his dog: Padfoot received a lot of confidences, including Remus’s wish to be the first wizard on the moon. ‘I wouldn’t be so scared of it if I could conquer it,’ he confided.

James slapped Sirius on the back. ‘Hard luck, mate! Her and Evans deserve each other. How about we all go and practise some Quidditch before school?’

‘Won’t have time,’ Sirius said. ‘Moony and I have to do our Divination presentation today.’ 

‘Suit yourself.’ James shrugged. ‘I’m off to get my broomstick. Coming, Pete?’

Remus started to follow them, but Sirius held him back. ‘Hang on a minute.’

‘What?’

‘I don’t know,’ Sirius said, with absolute truth. He couldn’t resist giving Remus a brief hug though. ‘And now I don’t know who I’m in love with either.’

‘Maybe it’s Wednesday’s girl,’ Remus said helpfully, as they sauntered back to the tower.

Sirius said, ‘Merlin, I hope not, because I've completely forgotten her name too.’

‘Anne.’

‘Moony, you’re like a walking Remembrall! Well, maybe it is Anne. Or maybe it’s you,’ Sirius joked, and they both laughed, and Sirius squeezed Remus’s hand to show he wasn’t meaning to be unkind, and kept hold of it as they went upstairs. He had an almost irresistible urge to sweep Remus away in an old-fashioned waltz along the corridors and down the Hogwarts staircases, then up again to the Divination tower. As it was, he gave him a quick twirl just outside the portrait hole, bending him backwards with a flourish. If he hadn’t actually gone mad, Sirius thought, he had probably swallowed a sunbeam or two with his breakfast. 

‘Really, maybe it _is_ you,’ he insisted, but Remus just smiled enigmatically, and didn’t remove his hand from Sirius’s as they walked through the crowded common room. 

**End**


End file.
